One-Eyed Jack (14 page)

“
I think so. He says he
did.”

He shook his head, staring out the
windshield rather than looking at me. “That’s bad.” Then he did
look at me. “You think he’s under some kind of spell or hex or
something?”

“
I don’t know, sir.
Honestly.”

“
Is a
spell like that
possible
?”

“
I don’t know. I wish I
did.”

“
So there wasn’t anything
in your dreams about that?”

“
Not
really.” I hesitated, then said, “Look, I don’t know how any of
this really works, but I don’t think it’s really a
spell
. I think here’s
this miserable kid who’s constantly fighting with his dad and
neglected by his mom, and he meets this ghost-woman who showers him
with attention and tells him everything he wants to hear – she
doesn’t
need
a
spell to get him devoted to her.”

“
I can see that,” Skees
said. “You think he’ll really go back to her?”

“
I don’t know,” I said.
“He might. Or maybe when the drugs wear off and he realizes what
she’s done to him, he’ll realize how stupid he was, that she’s just
a monster trying to feed on him.”

“
That might screw him up
worse, when he realizes he gave up a finger and an eye for
nothing.”

“
Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be
rough.”

For a moment neither of us said
anything. I was about to suggest starting the car when Skees said,
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking about flesh-eating ghosts
as if they’re real.”

I grimaced at that. “I
wish
I
didn’t
have to believe in them.”

He looked at me. “Maybe you don’t.
Maybe this is all some goddamn hoax you and your girlfriend put
together. Maybe that whole thing on the phone was some kind of
hypnosis.”

“
I don’t think you can
hypnotize someone over the phone,” I said.

“
Then it’s drugs, or
subliminals, or something – isn’t there supposed to be some kind of
sonic vibration that scares the crap out of people?”

“
Subsonics,” I said. “I
think I heard something about that.”

“
Well, maybe that’s what
your Madame Melisandra uses.”

In all the eight years
since Mrs. Reinholt cursed Mel, that had never occurred to me. I’d
seen it all happen, so I just accepted it as... well, magic. Now
that Skees mentioned it, though, I wondered. Oh, I don’t mean I
suddenly didn’t believe in the curse, or witchcraft, or any of the
rest of it, but maybe that was
how
the curse worked. Maybe that was why it was so
much worse when she spoke than when I just looked at her. Maybe
earplugs would help. It was something to try, anyway.

I shrugged. “She doesn’t do it on
purpose.”

“
So you say. People say a
lot of things that aren’t so, Mr. Kraft.”

I sighed. “I can’t prove anything,
Detective. I haven’t even made any claims, really, I just gave you
some hypotheticals.”

“
That’s bullshit, kid, and
you know it.”

I got angry at that. I was
short of sleep, I hadn’t had a real shower, I’d just talked to a
kid who thought the monster trying to eat him loved him, and here I
was with this cop calling me a liar. “You believe whatever you
want, then,” I said. “You think I’m lying to you, and there isn’t
any Jenny? Fine, you believe that if you want, but you still don’t
have anything on
me
. I don’t have any reason to hurt that kid, and I wasn’t even
in this
state
when something gnawed his finger off. If you think
I’m
the one who ate it,
then let’s go back inside and find a doctor who’ll pump my stomach,
so you can see I’m not a cannibal.”

“
Wouldn’t prove anything,” he said calmly. “No reason to think
you swallowed; if it
was
you, I figure you’d have spit it out.”

I didn’t have an answer for that, and
the image was just so grotesque I almost laughed. I didn’t, though;
I didn’t say anything at first. When I had a better handle on
myself I asked, “So what are you going to do?”

“
I’ve
got no reason to hold you,” he said. “You may be telling God’s own
truth and you may be right about everything, that it really is this
ghost monster that’s responsible. The kid’s story matches yours
well enough. Or maybe you believe what you’re telling me, but have
it wrong somehow – the kid thinks you do. Maybe you and the kid are
both crazy as a two-dick dog and believe it all, but it’s got
nothing to do with what’s really happening. I don’t
know
what’s going on. If
you and your girlfriend
are
running a scam of some kind, I’m damned if I can
figure out what the point of it is. And if I tried to hold you,
tried to get a warrant as a material witness or whatever, I’d need
to show the judge some reason to think you’re involved, and the
only reason I’ve got is that you’ve got no business in Lexington,
but here you are, and somehow I don’t think being a tourist is
gonna play as evidence against you. So what I’m gonna do, Mr.
Kraft, is take you back to your car and let you go about your
business, but I want to know how to get hold of you if I think of
any more questions – your cell number, any other phones you’ve got,
e-mail, whatever.”

“
Sure, that’s no problem,
Detective.” I tried not to sound as relieved as I felt. I’d been
thinking that at the very least he was going to tell me not to
leave Fayette County, and that would’ve meant paying a penalty to
change my flight home, or maybe needing a whole new ticket, and
probably losing my job, on top of it.

“
And if any of your ghosts
or dreams or witches tell you anything more about what’s going on,
you tell me, no matter how stupid it sounds.”

“
You’ve got it,
sir.”

“
Good.”

And with that, he finally started the
car.

Chapter Ten

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jack
again. Detective Skees didn’t tell me anything more, or ask me any
new questions. But I did go looking for Jenny again that evening,
right after sunset, and I found her, back under the tulip
poplar.

There were two cops sitting in a car
in front of the Wilsons’ house, and I knew they could probably see
me if they bothered to look the right direction, but I didn’t worry
about it; I wasn’t doing anything illegal, and if they arrested me
I’d just go back to Ben Skees.

Jenny was sitting cross-legged under
the tree, leaning forward, staring at her hand – staring at Jack’s
stolen finger, staring at it with Jack’s stolen eye. She was
rocking gently back and forth in utter silence, radiating woe and
hunger.

“
Jenny,” I
said.

She didn’t look up.

“
Jenny!” I repeated, more
loudly. She stopped rocking.

“
You need to leave Jack
alone,” I told her.

I love
him
, she said.

“
So you want to kill
him?”

I don’t want to. I need
to.

I hadn’t expected that; I’d expected
denials and evasions. “You intend to kill him?”

I need to.

“
You’re going to eat him
away, little by little, until there’s nothing left? Is that the
idea?”

She finally looked up at
me, with the one dark, empty eye and the one bright one.
I have to. I love him.

For a moment I thought I might throw
up, but I didn’t. “And then what?” I asked. “You go on to the next
kid?”

She didn’t answer; she just stared at
me. I don’t know whether she didn’t want to say, or whether she
really didn’t know herself, or what.

“
He thinks you’ll turn
human and live happily ever after,” I said. “Did you tell him
that?”

She still didn’t reply.

I decided to try a different tack.
“You don’t really love him, do you?” I demanded. “If you did, you
wouldn’t want to kill him.”

I love him. I must devour
him. I love him so much I want to eat him right up.

That sounded supremely creepy, but I
didn’t let that deter me. “The way you loved your own kids? The way
you killed little Susie and Bobby?”

She blinked her stolen
eye.
Susie? Bobby?

I gestured wildly.
“Whatever their names were.
I
don’t know – do you? Do you even
remember?”

Ashley. Sarah.
Jason.
My babies. I killed them. I loved
them, so I killed them, and now they’re dead, all dead dead
dead.

Okay, that was interesting. I had
names for her children now. Maybe I could track down Jenny’s past;
maybe that would give me some way to stop her.

“
What were their full
names, Jenny? Ashley Ghost? Ashley Smith?”

Ashley Derdiarian. My poor
lost Ashley.

Derdiarian? That was a stroke of luck,
I thought – that wasn’t a common name. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard
it before. There couldn’t be that many people out there named
Ashley Derdiarian.

“
Derdiarian? D E R D
A...”

She didn’t actually say anything, but
I knew she had somehow corrected my spelling, that there was a
silent I I’d missed.

“
Ashley, Sarah, and Jason?
You starved them to death?”

I did, yes, I did, I
locked them in their room and listened as they cried and begged and
screamed, and I would not let them out, and they died, and I went
in and saw their poor dead bodies lying there, and I cried and
wailed...

With that, she fell forward onto her
elbows, her long black hair falling down to hide her face, and she
shook with inaudible sobbing. I could feel her grief. It wasn’t
unusual for spooks to have a sort of emotional aura, and hers was
pretty strong.

It wasn’t even close to Mel’s, though.
I had no trouble dealing with it, not after eight years with the
Queen of Despair. “Where was their father?” I asked, trying to make
sense of this. “Didn’t anyone else hear them screaming?”

No father, no others, just
Jenny, just me and my babies.

Something about this didn’t make
sense.

Well, really,
nothing
about it made
sense. I was listening to a ghost explain how she had murdered her
children, and how that meant she had to eat Jack Wilson alive – how
could it make sense?

But I had to try to understand it, if
I wanted to stop it. I couldn’t physically stop Jenny, and I hadn’t
been able to talk Jack out of seeing her – though I thought he
might balk at dying for her. At the hospital he had seemed
unwilling to go that far.

That assumed, though, that her hold on
him wouldn’t be as strong as ever when they were together again;
being away from her for a day might have made him more rational.
When he actually saw her again, he might agree to
anything.

But maybe if I could convince her to
leave him alone, I could save him.

Of course, she might just go looking
for a new victim, but surely there couldn’t be very many kids with
a home-life as miserable as Jack’s, miserable enough to make a
ghost’s carnivorous love more precious than life itself.

Or maybe there could. I didn’t know
much about abused kids. Maybe there were thousands of them, and
Jack was just the first one who could see her and hear
her...

If he
was
the first. Maybe she didn’t
always start with eyes and fingers as appetizers; certainly plenty
of kids went missing.

“
So have you killed anyone
else?” I asked. “Your own three kids, and now you’re working on
Jack – were there any others?”

Go away. Let Jenny
mourn.
I could
feel
her desire to have me leave, as
well as sensing her words, but I ignored it.

“
Tell me, first,” I said.
“Have you loved any other children, besides your own and
Jack?”

Go away.
The psychic push increased.

“
Were there
others?”

Go away.
She seemed to have reached her limit, and it was
still scarcely an echo of Mel’s curse. I had no trouble resisting
it and staying there.

I argued for awhile longer; I offered
to give Jack a message for her if she told me the truth, I begged
and I shouted, but she didn’t answer, she just told me to go away.
I had apparently gotten everything out of her that I was going to
get – and I was tired and hungry and I wanted a shower, and
fighting her rejection eventually took a toll, so I gave up. I
turned and walked back to my rental car, leaving her curled up
under the tulip poplar, her white dress a bright patch in the
darkness, while darker, less human night-things moved silently
through the surrounding brush and climbed on the branches
above.